28 April 1801 A.D. Anthony Ashley Cooper (1801-1885)—7th Earl of Shaftesbury, Industrial Reformer, & Staunch Anti-Tractarian Anglican
28 April 1801 A.D. Anthony Ashley Cooper (1801-1885)—7th Earl of
Shaftesbury, Industrial Reformer, & Staunch Anti-Tractarian Anglican
Editors. “Anthony Ashley Cooper: 7th earl of
Shaftesbury.” Encyclopedia Britannica. N.d.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/537638/Anthony-Ashley-Cooper-7th-earl-of-Shaftesbury. Accessed 27 Apr 2015.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th earl of Shaftesbury, in full Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th earl of
Shaftesbury, Baron Cooper of Pawlett, Baron Ashley of Wimborne St. Giles
(born April 28, 1801, London, England—died October 1, 1885, Folkestone, Kent), one
of the most effective social and industrial reformers in 19th-century England.
He was also the acknowledged leader of the evangelical movement within the
Church of England.
He was the
eldest son of Cropley Cooper (a younger brother of the 5th earl of Shaftesbury)
and of Anne, daughter of the 4th duke of Marlborough. He became Lord Ashley
when his father succeeded to the earldom in 1811, was educated at Harrow and Christ
Church College, Oxford, and succeeded his father as earl in 1851.
A member of
the House of Commons from 1826, Ashley attacked the Reform Bill of 1832 for widening the franchise,
but he favoured the political emancipation of Roman Catholics and the repeal in
1846 of the Corn Laws (import duties on grain). Becoming a lunacy commissioner
in 1828 and commission chairman in 1834, he secured passage of the Lunacy Act of 1845, the first British statute to treat the
insane as “persons of unsound mind” rather than social outcasts. He early was
associated with the factory reform movement led by Richard Oastler and, in the House of
Commons, by Michael Thomas Sadler. In 1833, after Sadler’s defeat in an
election, Ashley replaced him as parliamentary leader of the movement for
shortening the working day in textile mills to 10 hours. Although popularly
known as Lord Ashley’s Act, the Ten Hours Act of 1847 was passed while he was
temporarily out of the House of Commons (January 1846–July 1847). In his
working for further factory reform legislation, he was accused by the radical
reformer John Bright not only of ignorance of actual working conditions in factories but also of unconcern for rural labourers,
including those on the Shaftesbury estates.
By his Mines Act of 1842, Ashley excluded all women and girls and all boys under the age of 10 from
underground coal mine employment, in which he had found boys aged 4 or 5
years. While serving as a member of the short-lived General Board of Health
(1848–54) and afterward, Shaftesbury (who succeeded to the earldom in 1851)
insisted that the government sponsor new
low-cost housing projects for urban workers and carefully inspect housing that
already existed. During his 39 years as president of the Ragged
Schools Union, that organization enabled about 300,000 destitute
children to be educated free at what were called ragged schools or industrial
feeding schools. He also served as president of the British and Foreign Bible
Society, founded numerous Young Men’s Christian associations and Workingmen’s
institutes, and financially supported missionary societies for Nonconformist
faiths as well as for the Church of England.
As a staunch
evangelical, he viewed with alarm the growing ritualism in the Church of
England and materially aided Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in the passage of
the Public Worship Act (1874), which checked the extension of Anglo-Catholic
practices.
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